


The shape of things have changed

by owlaholic68



Series: New Vegas Blues [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Dyslexia, Gen, Introspection, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers for Dead Money
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 20:17:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlaholic68/pseuds/owlaholic68
Summary: Christine stays.





	The shape of things have changed

Christine used to know herself.

She could walk around a room in the dark by memory alone. Now she stumbles and curses her bruised shins.

She could shoot a moving target from over 2,000 yards away. Now her hands shake when she holds a pistol.

She used to be able to look at herself in a mirror.

The Ghost People take no notice of her anymore, so she scampers freely across rooftops. She traces the letters of desperate graffiti, over and over again, saying each letter out loud in her borrowed voice, slowly putting them together. Sometimes she has to stop and hold her head, curse _him_ for doing this to her, ripping away something she had always taken for granted. After a month of straining and slowly putting jumbled letters together, she reads an entire phrase.

“Let go.”

The rooftop she sleeps on would have given her a perfect view of the stars, had they not been obscured by clouds. The Cloud darkens the sky too. She’s rigged up fans around her bed to keep it from crawling up into her lungs. Her setup is simple: a mattress, a locker with some provisions, a radio.

One night, Christine tunes the dials, switching from static to more static, pausing briefly on some smooth jazz, then moving on. Then the static fills the silent night. She turns the radio off. She traces the deep scars on her head like she traced those letters, over and over, as if they too hold some hidden meaning.

It’s not the loss of beauty that upsets her. Practicality before perfection, she’s always said. No, what makes her shaking hands clench around her own bruised and scarred throat is something altogether different. It’s the loss of control, a symbol of how much someone was able to take.

But the Couriers had given some of that back, in their own ways.

The first one had helped her recover, given her a chance to seize her own agency back. She had had an opportunity, back in the crater, to abandon her quest. But she hadn’t. She couldn’t.

The second one had lost something too. Christine had caught a glimpse once, when the Courier had taken off her security helmet. A pair of scars huddled above her right brow, almost hidden by her glasses. And she had understood the way Christine had clung to every scrap of revenge and fury. Christine saw it in the way she would grit her teeth at the mention of Elijah. The Courier would twitch and flinch at every stray noise, every whisper of metal under their feet, each quiet whirr of hologram emitters. And despite her terror, that Courier had respected her, treated her like an equal, given her companionship that she had so desperately craved.

Christine, crouched on a rooftop overlooking the fountain, frowns. If she desired company that badly, why had she stayed?

The woman in the fountain sadly smiles, a hand on her hip.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr.](https://owlaholic68.tumblr.com/)


End file.
